Domino Island: The unpublished thriller by the master of the genre. Desmond Bagley
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might or might not have been a uniform and, although they didn’t seem to carry guns, they looked as though they should have done. One stayed by the gate; the other came up to the car and bent to look at me.
‘My name is Kemp,’ I said. ‘Mrs Salton is expecting me.’
He straightened up, consulted a sheet of paper which he took from his pocket, and nodded. ‘You’re expected at the beach, Mr Kemp. The boat is waiting for you.’ He waved at the other man, who opened the gate.
What boat?
I found out about two hundred yards down the road the other side of the gate, where the asphalt curved into a bend giving a view over the sea. El Cerco was breathtaking. The natural coral formation was a perfect circle about three-quarters of a mile in diameter. Outside, the steady trade wind heaped up waves which crashed on to the coral, sending up spouts of foam, but inside that magic circle the water was smooth and calm.
Right in the centre was a small island, not more than a hundred yards across, and on it was a building, a many-planed structure that curved and nestled close to the ground on which it was built. It seemed as though David Salton had created his own Shangri-la. It was a pity he wasn’t around to enjoy it.
I drove on down the road, which descended steeply in a series of hairpin bends until it came to the edge of the lagoon. There was another house here and a row of garages with a big boathouse at the water’s edge. A man was waiting for me. He waved the car into a garage and when I came out he said, ‘This way, Mr Kemp,’ and led me to a jetty where a fast-looking motor launch was moored. Less than five minutes later I stepped ashore on the island in the middle of El Cerco.
An elderly servant stood in attendance. He had grey hair and wore a white coat – a typical Caribbean waiter. When he spoke I thought I recognised the voice I had heard on the telephone when I called the previous day. He said, ‘This way, Mr Kemp … sir.’ There was just the right pause to make the insolence detectable but not enough to complain about. I grinned at the thought that the staff didn’t like being ticked off by strangers.
The house had been designed by a master architect, so arranged that at times it was difficult to tell whether one was inside or outside. Lush tropical plants were everywhere and there were streams and fountains and the constant glint of light on pools. Most noticeably, the house was pleasantly cool in the steadily increasing heat.
We came into a quiet room and the old servant said softly, ‘Mr Kemp, ma’am.’
She rose from a chair. ‘Thank you, John.’
There was a man standing behind her but I ignored him because she was enough to fill the view. She was less than thirty, long of limb and with flaming red hair, green eyes and the kind of perfect complexion that goes with that combination. She was not at all what I had imagined as the widow of David Salton, fifty-two-year-old building tycoon.
A lot of thoughts chased through my mind very quickly but, out of the helter-skelter, two stayed with me. The first was that a woman like Jill Salton would be a handful for any man. Physical beauty is like a magnet and any husband married to this one could expect to be fighting off the competition with a club.
The second thought was that under no circumstance in law can a murderer benefit by inheritance from the person murdered.
Now why should I have thought that?
I
‘Mr Kemp, glad to meet you,’ said Mrs Salton. She showed no sign of being aware of my goggle-eyed reaction; perhaps to her it was standard from the human male. Her grip was pleasantly firm. ‘This is Mr Stern.’
Reluctantly I shifted my gaze. Stern was a tall man somewhere in his mid-thirties. His features had the handsome regularity of a second-rank movie star. First-rank stars don’t need it – just look at John Wayne. He smiled genially and stepped forward to shake my hand. I let him crush my fingers and looked expectantly at Mrs Salton. ‘Mr Stern is my lawyer,’ she said.
I allowed a twitch of an eyebrow to betray surprise as I was manoeuvred to a seat. Stern caught it and laughed. ‘I invited myself over,’ he said. ‘Mrs Salton happened to mention your proposed visit when she telephoned me yesterday. I thought it advisable to be on hand.’
‘To hear Lord Hosmer’s expressions of regret?’ I said ironically.
‘Oh, come now,’ said Stern. ‘The chairman of Western and Continental didn’t send a man across the Atlantic just for that. Besides, he has already spoken to Mrs Salton on the telephone.’
She was sitting opposite me, her hands in her lap smoothing the hem of the simple black dress she wore, and her eyes were downcast. I said, ‘Will you accept my regrets, Mrs Salton? I’ve heard your husband spoken of highly.’
‘Thank you, Mr Kemp,’ she said quietly, and looked up. ‘Can I offer you anything? We were just about to have coffee.’
‘Coffee would be very nice.’
Stern was about to say something when John trundled a loaded tea trolley into the room. He had to do something with his open mouth so he said innocuously, ‘Did you have a good flight?’
‘As good as they ever are, I suppose.’
We stuck to trivialities while John was serving the coffee, and I studied Mrs Salton appraisingly. She was a very still woman and appeared to have no mannerisms of gesture, her voice was quiet and restful – educated and English – and I thought it would be most relaxing to spend time in her company. Her beauty did not come out of a Max Factor bottle but stemmed from good bone structure and sheer animal health.
John departed and Stern waited until he was out of earshot before he asked, ‘Can we assume that the insurance claim will be met expeditiously?’
I studied him with interest. He seemed to be as jittery as Mrs Salton was placid, and he couldn’t wait to bring up the subject. ‘It will be handled as quickly as circumstances allow.’
He frowned. ‘Do you mean that the circumstances are unusual?’
‘I mean that the company, as yet, knows very little about the circumstances. There are one or two points to be clarified. That’s why I’m here, rather than a loss adjuster.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘I’m an independent consultant,’ I said. ‘Rather different remit, you see.’
‘What remit?’ he demanded, almost aggressively.
I ignored the question and looked again at Mrs Salton, who was sitting watchfully with no expression at all on her face. I said, ‘What was Mr Salton’s departure point when he took the boat out that final time?’
She stirred. ‘He sailed from here.’
‘The boat was found four days later drifting off Buque Island – that’s the other side of Campanilla. A long way.’
‘That was gone into at the inquest,’ said Stern. ‘The wind direction and the current drift accounted for it satisfactorily.’
‘Maybe, but I was looking at the sea as I came here. In whichever direction I looked there was a boat. There are a lot of yachts here and four days is a long time. It seems odd that Mr Salton’s boat wasn’t discovered earlier.’
‘A matter of chance,’ said Stern. ‘And boats don’t approach each other too closely anyway. Even at a hundred yards you couldn’t tell …’ He looked at Mrs Salton and stopped.
‘But Mr Salton was missing for four days. Didn’t anyone worry about that?’
Stern started to speak but Mrs Salton interrupted. ‘I’ll explain. I didn’t know David was missing.’ She paused. ‘My husband and I had a quarrel – a rather bad one.